Lists & Articles

Cigarettes in Paradise

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

How Many Cigarettes? is the dirtbag slacker equivalent of fellow movie-metric website Does the Dog Die?. Instead of measuring movies by their tally of potential trauma-triggers (such as gratuitous canine deaths), How Many Cigarettes? tallies the number of cigarettes smoked onscreen. If its characters rip enough cigs to reach a one-smoke-every-5-minutes runtime ratio, a movie automatically qualifies as “A Real Smoker Movie,” since its audience could conceivably chainsmoke throughout it without ever having to smoke alone. How Many Cigarettes? is a decidedly tongue-in-cheek project, one my friend Leigh started as an ex-smoker who still recognizes the allure of a cinematic cigarette and a life-pausing smoke break. The project is even more thorough than it is silly, though, capturing dozens of screengrabs each from hundreds of movies so people can get a quick glimpse of how many cigarettes are smoked in classics like Jurassic Park (7), GoodFellas (53), Mulholland Drive (7), and Casablanca (124!). As arbitrary as that metric may seem at first, it has forever altered how I watch movies. Once you start looking for cigarettes, it’s hard to stop. I remember sitting next to Leigh at a local screening of Almodóvar’s High Heels and had to ask if the pregnant woman smoking onscreeen counted as two cigarettes, since she was technically smoking for two. He seemed amused by the question, but my guess is that the hardline answer is it only counted as one cig. When you’re collecting raw data for “Real Smoker Movie” metrics, these distinctions really matter.

The How Many Cigarettes? project reached its natural zenith this week when Leigh presented a Gap Tooth screening of Aki Kaurismäki’s dead-eyed 1986 romcom Shadows in Paradise at The Broad. He introduced the film—Kaurismäki’s finest work, from what I’ve seen—as a core title in the Real Smoker Movie canon, citing it as the movie that first inspired him to start counting cigs in the first place. There are 71 cigarettes smoked in Shadows in Paradise, which is impressive for a film only 74 minutes in length. In the hand-illustrated zine he produced to accompany the screening, Leigh writes, “The number of cigarettes smoked here seems like a joke. Almost every scene has between 1 and 9 people smoking cigarettes.” He’s right. Once you start counting, the rate of cigarettes being lit from scene to scene becomes outright comical. Every single conversation is punctuated with the flick of a lighter, pulls on a filter, and the stamping of a cherry. And yet, it’s honestly something I didn’t notice the first time I watched the film back in 2021, alongside the other Kaurismäki classics The Match Factory Girl, The Man Without a Past, and The Other Side of Hope. Growing up in the 80s & 90s, chainsmoking just seemed like a normal, everyday part of adulthood, back when my dad would smoke entire packs of Marlboro Golds indoors, as if he were enjoying a snack or a soda. So, watching the despondent, lovelorn characters of Kaurismäki’s Helsinki chat over a constant procession of smoke breaks just felt natural to the movie’s time & place. Rewatching the movie through the How Many Cigarettes? filter, though, some of the cigarette-specific images do feel intentionally comical, like when Matti Pellonpää appears smoking while wearing sunglasses indoors, hiding his romantic heartbreak behind a costumey idea of vintage rock ‘n’ roll cool. The cigarettes are both artificial movie props and natural urban decor. They are essential to the movie’s mise-en-scène.

Something I did notice about Shadows in Paradise the first time I watched it was all the trash. There are enough standalone shots of wet garbage in the film to inspire a How Many Cigarettes? sister site that measures movies by their literal trashiness, per-pound. Pellonpää stars as a lonely garbage man who slowly, carefully sparks a romance with a jaded grocery store clerk, played by fellow Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen. In genre terms, it’s an awkwardly stilted romcom, delivered in a proto-Wes Anderson flat affect as the blue-collar pair gradually earn equal footing in each other’s esteem one smoke break at a time. From a broader view, it offers stray documentary glimpses into 1980 Finnish waste treatment processes, trailing Pellonpää from dumpster to dumpster as he hauls away endless heaps of trash. His social status as a garbage man directly plays into his dateability too, as his only viable romantic foil is a middle-manager yuppie dipshit who lords over a trendy clothing store. Outinen seems a little embarrassed to be dating a garbage collector, but it’s still instantly obvious that she won’t be able to make it last with the yuppie, because it’s impossible to picture her sharing a cigarette with him behind a grocery store dumpster. Pellonpää knows his way around an ashtray, though, and his social status as a trash-hauling beer guzzler can be adorable in its own way, once you get past the smell. There’s a pitch-black urban despair to Shadows in Paradise that echoes throughout Kaurismäki’s other works, but it’s mostly one of set dressing & social circumstance, as typified by its empty beer bottles and crushed cigarette butts. It’s ultimately a very sweet love story, though, a romcom that deals exclusively in deadpan whimsy.

If there’s anything direct Kaurismäki was attempting to signal to his audience through all of the onscreen trash & cigarettes, it’s that Shadows in Paradise is meant to be a love story for The People. He even went as far as to group it with The Match Factory Girl & Ariel as his official “Proletariat Trilogy.” It probably means something, for instance, that when Pellonpää & Outinen exit the film via cruise ship for a makeshift honeymoon, the vessel is decorated with the Communist hammer & sickle. Likewise, How Many Cigarettes? is a movie database for The People, decidedly unpretentious in its selections and open for collaboration with its patrons. Leigh has opened the database up for volunteer contributions, which you can find information about on the site’s About page. Even more generously, he has uploaded a printable copy of the “Every Cigarette Smoked in Aki Kaurismäki’s Shadows in Paradise” zine, which includes a brush-pen illustration of every cigarette smoked in the movie, along with a leaderboard of some Real Smoker Movie heavy-hitters like The Bikeriders (104), Road House (71), The French Dispatch (86), and Smithereens (37). Print yourself a copy and poke around the website the next time you’re bored on a smoke break or just looking for your next Movie Night selection, to be determined by one absurdly specific metric.

-Brandon Ledet

Nuclear Missed Connections

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Ross McElwee’s landmark 1985 documentary Sherman’s March is now back in circulation, pristinely restored and streaming VOD for anyone who’s already watched every episode of How To with John Wilson and is searching for their next softspoken doomsayer fix. At first glance, Sherman’s March appears to be wryly narcissistic, with McElwee spending nearly three hours overanalyzing his own trivial romantic foibles instead of directly tackling the historical topic he was granted money to document. It’s not so much the Civil War military campaign of Sherman March‘s title that has been lingering with me in the weeks since I first saw the film, though. I’ve instead found myself dwelling on the significance of its subtitle, A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Proliferation. Like everyone else raised during the existential uncertainty of the Cold War, McElwee can’t help but filter his personal decisions and worldview through the lens of imminent nuclear annihilation. What, ultimately, would be the point making a romantic connection in the end times of the 1980s, given that the push of a few buttons could end all human existence the entire planet over at any given minute? In practice, the potential for nuclear war doesn’t directly affect McElwee’s love life all that much in Sherman’s March, except during the stretch where he romantically pursues a nuclear disarmament activist. The threat of nuclear holocaust does quietly hum in the background throughout the picture, though, as intentionally provoked by its subtitle. It was, presumably, a constant hum in the background of everything in that era, as I’ve continued to hear it humming in the couple other late-80s, early-90s titles that I’ve happened to catch in the past couple weeks since writing about Sherman’s March.

I mostly threw on 1988’s Miracle Mile because it offered a rare opportunity to see Anthony Edwards in a lead role outside the television show I’m currently binge-watching: ER. Even better, Edwards’s love interest in the film is played by Mare Winningham, who had a brief run as Edwards’s maniacally obsessed stalker on ER and who also recently married him in real life after a long-simmering infatuation. That odd, bittersweet connection between the two actors is only amplified by Miracle Mile, which initially plays like a video store-era romcom before it blows up into a nuclear disaster epic. Edwards stars as a bitterly sarcastic Los Angeleno who finally finds a woman he vibes with in the desperately lonely, phony West Coast city — a devil-may-care free spirit played by Winningham. Unfortunately, they only go on one sweetheart date before Edwards receives the payphone call that ruins everything.  A stranger on the other end of the line tells him that the world is about to end and the bombs are already on their way, so Edwards scrambles to recruit a crew of fellow survivors from an all-night diner to escape the fallout, in a prototype for Gore Verbinki’s recent apocalyptic satire Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Only, no one can manage to catch the first helicopter out of town because everyone has someone in their life they want to take with them to safety, delaying departure to disastrous results. For Edwards’s sadsack lead, that special someone is a girl he just met, which would be sweetly romantic if it weren’t for the fact that both of their faces will likely be melted off by a nuclear blast before they get a chance to properly smooch. If it weren’t for Miracle Miles‘s moody synth score from Tangerine Dream, you could mistake its opening half for an old-school Hollywood romcom. Once the bombs are on their way, though, things get increasingly bleak, and the “possibility of romantic love in […] an era of nuclear proliferation” only gets bleaker by the minute until the story abruptly ends at the bleakest moment imaginable.

In the broadest terms, Miracle Mile does function as a comedy, but it’s also a city-wide portrait of a Cold War community in distress. Tonally, it’s the Los Angeles version of Scorsese’s After Hours, just as funny as it is stressful. The geographic specificity of its setting and the maniacally episodic nature of Edwards’s interactions with his fellow freaked-out Los Angelenos also reminded me a lot of McElwee’s romantic missed connections in Sherman’s March in ways I didn’t expect, given the disparity in the two films’ chosen genres. Likewise, I didn’t expect to be dwelling on that same topic yet again while watching Richard Linklater’s 1990 debut Slacker, which recently screened at The Broad’s repertory Gap Tooth series. Linklater himself appears on camera in the opening scene of Slacker to lay out the film’s episodic structure. He plays an aimless Gen-X slacker who’s too overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of life to make any significant choice about what to do with himself, since every path he could take is just as valid and justifiable as the other. This apparently extends to his indecision on what story to tell, as Slacker spends an entire day hopping from one conversation to another down the sun-damaged streets of Austin, Texas, eavesdropping on a nonstop parade of absurdly verbose underachievers as they ramble about whatever’s on their empty minds, one thought at a time. Like the regional South of Sherman’s March and the late-night Los Angeles of Miracle Mile, the Austin of Slacker is revealed to the audience through broad communal portraiture, with every chatty loser who crosses the screen just as worthy of their own day-in-the-life portrait as the next. Like in the other two movies, Slacker also finds its community psychologically fucked up by the constant threat of nuclear obliteration, as expressed in random characters’ paranoid political rants and in one specific weirdo’s video-art instillation that loops nuclear test footage across a haphazard collection of cathode-ray TVs. Only, Linklater’s proudly unambitious characters appear to be preemptively operating as if the world has already ended, without waiting for the bombs to actually go off. It’s long been over, and everyone who’s left hanging around after our undetected apocalypse has their own crackpot theories on how it happened and how humanity can best spend our time toiling in the rubble.

I was a lot more charmed by Slacker than I usually am by Linklater’s low-effort Gen-X posturings, if not only because its turned-on, tuned-in, dropped-out hipsterdom spoke to a larger political sentiment within its contemporary moment (something his later, bigger-budgeted works would repeatedly attempt to recreate with no discernible thematic point at all). As one Austinite slacker puts it, “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.” Admittedly, I also enjoyed the movie simply because I enjoyed hanging around the late-80s Austin scene populated by its various losers & eccentrics. Sure, it’s overrun with twentysomething stoner philosophers who are way too confident that they understand How the World Works for kids who haven’t yet lived a real life, but there’s something undeniably charming about their zen-like collective naivete. I also found myself getting excited by minor details specific to that exact Austin moment, like the deranged conman rant from Butthole Surfers drummer Teresa Nervosa or the brief sound of Daniel Johnston’s chord organ playing in a passing car (or, even more particularly, the appearance of Johnston’s one-time girlfriend Kathy McCarty, who gives extensive interviews about his life & art in The Devil and Daniel Johnston). It’s impossible to love every crazed Austinite who spouts their own personal conspiracy theories about our post-apocalyptic planet in Slacker, but it’s easy to love the city that allows them blow around in the Texas breeze like human tumbleweeds, jobless and relatively carefree. The same goes for the late-night diner patrons of Miracle Mile and the genteel, Southern-accented women of Sherman’s March. As individuals, they can be grating or alarming, but as broader communities, they’re a joy to spend time with. That’s why it’s so tragic that time is running out for them, that the doomsday clock is tirelessly ticking away. Each of these Cold War communal portraits find their doomed citizens scrambling to make meaningful connections with each other while the threat of nuclear apocalypse looms outside the frame. They all make a point to portray a version of humanity that is worth saving while also acknowledging that it’s likely too late to stop the bombs from going off anyway. Thank your lucky stars that it’s not the 1980s anymore, and it no longer feels like we’re living pointless lives in the earliest hours of the apocalypse. It might be difficult to fully enjoy each other’s company knowing that we’ve already reached the beginning of the end.

-Brandon Ledet

Rep Report: Back to (Film) School

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

The New Orleans social calendar never feels emptier than it does in the summer, when it’s too hot to do much outside the house and anyone with real money leaves town to cool off anyway. As a result, I haven’t been catching many repertory screenings in recent months, as there haven’t been many enticing opportunities on offer. Smaller series like ScreamFest NOLA and Gap Tooth Cinema have been on summer hiatus, and the legacy institution of the Rene Brunet Classic Movies series has been on TCM-programming autopilot. Now that summer is officially over, though, the city is coming back to life, and the local classic-movies scene is waking up along with it. After only catching three rep screenings all summer (one-off showings of All the President’s Men, Under the Cherry Moon, and Sleepaway Camp), I’m once again hitting up my regular rotation of classic-movies hot spots. It’s like the fall semester of film school just started, with a randomized syllabus of vintage movie titles worth experiencing big & loud with a studious crowd. To that end, here are a few quick reviews of the local repertory screenings I happened to catch over the past couple weeks, now that school is back in session.

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
@ Rene Brunet’s Classic Movies (The Prytania)

One of the biggest new releases of the summer—both in production scale and in box office returns—was Christopher Nolan’s ensemble-cast adaptation of The Odyssey, which The Prytania tirelessly ran on a 70mm film print every night for a solid month. The Odyssey also seemingly inspired a recent selection for their Classic Movies series: 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts, another sword-and-sandal action epic inspired by Greek myth & poetry. The two behemoth actioners made for an instructive contrast-and-compare exercise, illustrating how Hollywood spectacle has changed over the years. Jason and the Argonauts boasts all of the island-hopping special effects showcases of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey without any of the procedural justification weighing down the bookends. Nolan makes you spend a tedious amount of time farting around a banquet hall with Tom Holland & John Leguizamo before he rewards your patience with the monsters, witches, and goddesses that liven up the middle stretch of The Odyssey, while older modes of Hollywood action filmmaking don’t feel the need to justify the indulgence. Jason and the Argonauts throws giants, harpies, and hydra heads at its audience as quickly as it can, only pulling away from the action to show the gods watching it unfold in amusement on their divine television. Once Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeleton army is defeated at the climax, the movie ends abruptly, knowing better than to bore its audience with the journey home. You’ve already gotten what you paid to see, now be on your merry way.

Black God, White Devil (1964)
@ Gap Tooth Cinema (The Broad)

One movie that’s in less of a rush to satisfy or entertain is the 1964 arthouse Western whatsit Black God, White Devil, which played to an unusually quiet crowd at its recent Gap Tooth screening. In Western terms, it’s helpful to think of it more in parallel with Jodorowsky than with Eastwood, since it’s more interested in the mood & iconography of the Western than any of the genre’s narrative payoffs. Black God, White Devil is not a proper Western so much as it is a Brazilian class-politics screed melted down in the midday sun and then loosely remolded into the vague shape of a Western. Landlords, cult leaders, outlaws, and bandits roam the draught-stricken 1940s Brazilian backcountry (the sertão), establishing a make-it-up-as-you-go version of justice as they murder each other for one personal wrong after another. Its violence can be shockingly gnarly, including acts of genital mutilation, flesh flaying, and ritualistic sacrifice of a newborn baby. At other times, its violence is pure genre pastiche, with individual episodes of religious or capitalist injustice being interrupted by unseen six-shooter gunfire while the camera waves around wildly and everyone scrambles for cover. For the most part, though, the movie is interested in talking out its violence in barely coherent mumblings about life’s many cruelties, each player in its wasteland crime saga dehydrated to the point of raving delirium. Its scene-to-scene logic is difficult to follow, and its donkey-trot pacing is brutally slow, but its political anger is clearly communicated through every frame all the same.

Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
@ Films on the Green (Alliance Française)

As the temperature cools in early fall, people start hosting free outdoor screenings of cinematic classics around New Orleans’s various social hubs, usually marketed as family-friendly movie nights showing recent animated favorites. On the more daring end of that fall-semester ritual, the French cultural hub Alliance Française is hosting a series called Films on the Green this month, which they kicked off with 1958’s Elevator to the Gallows. Their introduction to the film claimed that Louis Malle’s first narrative feature was also the first film of the French New Wave, which feels a little historically dubious but spiritually true. Elevator to the Gallows opens with an amoral yuppie executing a fairly convincing plan to kill his boss and run away with that boss’s widow but then gets stuck in an elevator car mid-escape, leaving him vulnerable to discovery & arrest. Meanwhile, his mistress (the effortlessly chic Jeanne Moreau) and the neighboring flower shop girl are left distraught by his unexplained absence, going mad in the late-night hours waiting for his return. The lovelorn teenager and her reprobate boyfriend steal the amateur assassin’s car and commit other crimes under his alias, while Moreau listlessly wanders the rainy streets of Paris to an improvised jazz score from none other than Miles Davis. Elevator to the Gallows truly is a perfect encapsulation of the French New Wave project in the way it uses noirish American crime thriller tropes as an excuse for high-style, street-level renegade filmmaking, even if Malle’s name is far from the first to come to mind when citing the pioneers on the inside of the movement: Varda, Godard, Truffaut, etc.

Pandora’s Box (1929)
@ David Bradley’s Classic Silent Films (Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge)

If the jazzy arthouse noir flourishes of Elevator to the Gallows trumpeted the earliest notes of the French New Wave, then 1929’s Pandora’s Box signaled the arrival of an even earlier icon of cinematic cool. There’s something undeniably foundational about Louise Brooks’s gothy flapper vibe in this silent-era German classic, to the point where it’s almost Biblical. If I could quote Genesis, “On the eight day, G.W. Pabst said let there be a party girl with a blunt bob, and there was a party girl with a blunt bob. And people saw the bob and saw that it was cool as fuck.” Of course, no pleasure-seeking woman of the silver screen gets by without being punished for her hedonism, so Brooks’s iconic character Lulu is inevitably put through the ringer in the second half of Pandora’s Box, after the audience gets plenty of time to celebrate her for being the coolest woman who ever lived in the first. She drinks, she dances, she parties, she sleeps around, and then she temporarily lucks into marrying a wealthy man before being forced to shoot him dead. On the run from the law, her fabulous party girl lifestyle quickly falls apart, and the “Fucking Around” opening half of the film is equally balanced out by the unavoidable “Finding Out” concluding half. You can always tell that these classic road-to-ruin cautionary tales never really believe their own bullshit; they have way too much fun indulging in hedonistic excess for the audience to fully believe the tragic cosmic punishments that follow in moral rebuke. That aspect of Pandora’s Box was only underlined by its live-piano scoring at the Zeitgeist, which had to compete with the booming sound of bounce DJ sets from the party venue next door. Even when the mood got somber in the more dramatic back half, the first-half party still persistently echoed in the room. No matter what happens to her, Lulu remains aspirationally cool and fun to be around – poor thing.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Spermworld (2024)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Lance Oppenheim’s compulsive sperm donorship documentary Spermworld (2024).

00:00 Welcome
01:31 Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
10:29 Double Indemnity (1944)
18:10 Black God, White Devil (1964)
27:15 Lifeboat (1944)
37:00 Spellbound (1945)
47:00 The Paradine Case (1947)
1:02:13 Rope (1948)
1:08:39 It Ends (2026)
1:13:10 Coyote vs Acme (2026)
1:21:33 Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
1:24:32 Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

1:41:17 Spermworld (2024)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Harpo Numero Uno

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Do people rank their favorite Marx Bros the way they rank their favorite Beatles? There are some clear parallels between the two groups. Zeppo, of course, is the Ringo of the Marx family, putting in steady background work that catches all of the mockery and none of the credit. Groucho & Chico are the Marx Bros’ Lennon-McCartney songwriting duo: legendary lyrical talents who could craft a joke so brilliantly, beautifully simple that it appears effortless. That leaves Harpo as the Marx equivalent to George: the abstraction, the artist, the connoisseur’s favorite. Groucho & Chico might have the most widely remembered Marx bits thanks to the eternal quotability of their rapidfire wordplay, but Harpo is the unpredictable, undefinable element that makes the vaudeville group’s cinematic output for Paramount convincingly, enduringly rank among the greatest comedies every made. If Groucho’s 4th-wall-breaking smartassery was the inspiration for Bugs Bunny’s wascally, wisecracking persona, Harpo’s schtick was the blueprint for the zanier, more surreal touches of Looney Tunes slapstick – crafting all-timer sight gags out of nonstop chaos & violence. He’s just as deserving of celebration as a screen comedy icon, selling curly blonde wigs on costume store shelves right next to Groucho’s famous “beaglepuss” glasses.

The one time Harpo might’ve been properly appreciated as the best of the Marx Bros was in the group’s film debut, 1929’s Cocoanauts. Adapted from a stage musical at a time when Hollywood productions were still learning how to incorporate sound recording equipment, Cocoanauts finds Groucho & Chico struggling to get their puns & dirty jokes across with their usual clarity & machine-gun rhythms. Meanwhile, Harpo is just as funny as he ever was, acting as the rickety bridge from Chaplin-style silent comedy to the early sound era that the Marx Bros would soon collectively master. He is a mute little tramp, and a scoundrel. While Groucho plays the wisecracking manager of a failing Florida resort, Harpo tears into the scene like a human tornado, causing nonstop chaos for a business that’s already got enough problems without him. Within seconds of arriving, he’s eating jacket buttons off Groucho’s bellboys, tearing up guests’ mail into confetti, and stealing money directly from the concierge’s cash register. Much of Cocoanauts is a cutesy, well-behaved stage musical romance that happens to add in dashes of Marx Bros humor for flavor, and Harpo’s the one spice note that comes through the strongest. It’s no one’s favorite Marx Bros movie, but he makes sure it’s no one’s least favorite either.

It’s at the start of the brothers’ follow-up film, 1930’s Animal Crackers, where Harpo goes toe-to-toe with Groucho in direct competition for group MVP. The movie starts with Groucho being introduced to a society party as Captain Spaulding, an African explorer returning from safari with heroic tales to recount to anyone who’ll listen. Of course, Groucho immediately undercuts this ostentatious introduction by firing off a long string of hypersexual, self-deprecating one-liners that reveal his true nature as a pervert and a coward, much to his host’s embarrassment. Then, Harpo is given a similar grand introduction as The Professor, an erudite academic who is meant to impress the same captive audience with his expertise in fine art. Harpo looks unusually well put-together during this entrance, wearing a high-quality top hat & coat combo that doesn’t match his go-to scrappy pickpocket persona. When a servant removes his coat, however, the rest of his clothes come off with it, shocking the mansion’s welcome party with his underwear-clad body. Then, he immediately grabs a gun from Groucho’s safari arsenal and starts firing randomly at guests, clearing the room with a purposeless escalation of violence. Those two introductions are about as direct of a one-to-one comparison between Groucho & Harpo’s comedic styles as you’ll find and, while both are funny, it’s the latter one that earns the bigger laughs.

The Marx Bros didn’t only charm the masses with slapstick violence & punny wordplay; they also carried over vaudeville variety show tradition to the screen by playing beautiful music. Groucho would sing bright & bubbly show tunes with absurd in-character lyrics; Chico played a mean piano, often showing off by tapping keys with finger guns; and Harpo, of course, played the harp. Originally inspired by an advertisement’s illustration of a cherub, Harpo was a self-taught harpist who leaned heavily into the angelic softness of his chosen instrument, while also repurposing the childlike curly wig of a cherub to instead recall a circus clown. While he would spend the majority of his screentime performing manic prop comedy, chasing young women around the set like Benny Hill, and indulging in some sleight of hand pickpocketry, Harpo would always put his sadistic clown antics aside for a minute to treat his audience with the heavenly sounds of the harp. Imagine if Tom Green paused in the middle of Freddy Got Fingered to sincerely play the cello; it’s quite the switcheroo. The in-universe logic of whatever character Harpo’s playing never gets in the way of that indulgence, either. In 1932’s Horse Feathers, he plays a barfly dogcatcher who shows surprising talent as a harpist but no aptitude whatsoever for playing football with the boys; go figure.

There’s obviously no need to rank the Marx Bros against each other, since the fraternal goofballs work best as a full set. Groucho’s filthy wordplay, Chico’s circular logic, and Harpo’s madcap sadism would all get exhausting in isolation without their brothers balancing out the rhythms of their act; that’s mainly why Zeppo hangs around, acting as the group’s only calming presence. It’s just notable that Harpo is an impossible act to follow and is thus consistently slotted last in rotation, if not only because he’ll clear a room with a pistol or an industrial size bottle of chloroform when given the chance. There’s a famous bit in 1931’s Monkey Business where all four brothers, essentially playing themselves, take turns impersonating heartthrob crooner Maurice Chevalier as a way of getting one over on shipboard immigration cops. Zeppo’s got a handsome-enough look that he thinks he can get away with the deception but immediately fails; Groucho & Chico, of course, think they can talk their way out of the crisis but they don’t get very far either. Then, Harpo stomps onto the scene, tearing up the immigration authorities’ paperwork and causing his usual maddening chaos before then launching into an eerily perfect Maurice Chevalier impersonation . . . which is revealed to be a drag routine lip-sync act involving a phonograph player hidden behind his back. It’s such a perfectly, deliriously absurd escalation of the bit that no one can follow it. Harpo’s is always the ultimate punchline, which makes for a credible argument that he is the funniest person who ever lived, especially since his only true competition is his own brother Groucho.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Harry and Tonto (1974)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Art Carney’s Oscar-winning performance as a roadtripping old grump in Harry and Tonto (1974)

00:00 Welcome

02:02 Marx Bros blind spots
10:41 Hitchcock blind spots
28:50 Coyote vs Acme (2026)
34:00 Still of the Night (1982)
41:42 Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)
50:23 Miami Blues (1990)
58:12 The Player (1992)
1:09:00 Sherman’s March (1985)
1:16:07 Maps to the Stars (2014)
1:25:05 The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026)
1:33:44 The End of Oak Street (2026)

1:48:00 Harry and Tonto (1974)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Podcast #271: Sleepaway Camp II – Unhappy Campers (1988) & Summer Camp Slashers

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Welcome to Episode #271 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss a grab bag of summer camp slashers, starting with Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988).

00:00 Welcome
02:30 The End of Oak Street (2026)
05:55 I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998)
09:11 Sequels of the Blind Dead
13:15 Popcorn (1991)
17:00 Nightborn (2026)

24:31 Sleepaway Camp II – Unhappy Campers (1988)
40:43 Madman (1981)
57:50 The Burning (1981)
1:09:00 Cheerleader Camp (1988)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: The Hairy Bird (1998)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the ensemble-cast boarding school comedy The Hairy Bird (1998), a.k.a. All I Wanna Do, a.k.a. Strike!

00:00 Christopher Nolan
14:00 The Odyssey (2026)
33:00 War and Peace (1965-1967)
37:48 Conan the Destroyer (1984)
40:40 Red Sonja (1985)
46:30 The NeverEnding Story (1984)
53:20 Her Private Hell (2026)
1:00:11 The Taste of Tea (2004)
1:04:55 Millennium Actress (2001)
1:10:46 The Invite (2026)
1:20:12 After Hours (1985)

1:27:20 The Hairy Bird (1998)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Irony, Sincerity, Hilarity, Clarity

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Does a comedy owe its audience even an ounce of heartfelt sincerity, or is it enough to just tell jokes? Is ironic detachment an open excuse for artistic laziness, or can it be a useful tool that cuts deeper than straightforward sentimentality when wielded with intent? I recently took in a double feature of new-release comedies that challenged my relationship with ironic, bad-on-purpose humor, which I used to enjoy without reservation half a lifetime ago. In my early 20s, I would’ve been over the moon for David Wain’s latest ironic joke-fest Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which is so relentlessly, purposelessly stupid it’s almost indistinguishable from a hack studio comedy from a lesser mind. Instead, I swooned for the equally ironic but much more purposeful Maddie’s Secret, a new John Early vehicle that parodies hack TV movies & afterschool specials of a bygone era while also honoring their ability to make an audience cry.  Both were funny on their own terms, but only one made me genuinely feel something, which is an effect I didn’t know I needed in a comedy until I saw it was possible.

To paraphrase the great Robert Bresson, Gail Daughtry offers neither beautiful images nor necessary ones. The film starts in Everywhere, Suburbia, mimicking the imagistic sensibilities of a studio comedy from at least two decades ago. When our titular plucky hairstylist (Zoey Deutch) leaves the safety of the suburbs behind for a life-changing adventure in Los Angeles, the images shift to mimic the B-roll stock footage of an Entertainment Tonight segment showcasing the glitz & glam of Hollywood living . . . also from at least two decades ago. Everything you see in Gail Daughtry is intentionally, hideously stale, and much of its humor relies on its jokes being punishingly unfunny, all for the sake of above-it-all ironic detachment. If there’s any emotional investment in its low-effort mockery of pre-existing entertainment, it’s in the film’s broad parody of the Old Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz. Gail Daughtry’s name is a mirrored slant-rhyme of Dorothy Gale’s. The wizard she hopes to meet in the emerald city of Los Angeles is Jon Hamm (playing himself), whom she’s desperate to sleep with after her fiancée improbably acts on his own “celebrity sex pass,” to even the score. Along the way, she gathers a ragtag group of daffy bozos: a brainless management-agency desk clerk (Ben Wang), a heartless paparazzo (Ken Marino), and the cowardly John Slattery (again, himself). Along for the entire ride is her pet gay bestie Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), another anagrammatic reference to Toto. The Wizard of Oz homages are genuinely cute & heartwarming throughout, acting as the one shining beacon of effort & sincerity in a comedy that would otherwise rather not bother.

Maddie’s Secret is a different story. Ostensibly, the film is a winking, ironic parody of the made-for-TV “women’s issues” movie Kate’s Secret (1986), now set in the modern world of culinary “content creators.” Only, it’s not clear exactly how much of that parody is meant to be taken as a joke. John Early stars as the titular Maddie, reviving the same exaggerated drag mannerisms he brought to his 2021 “redux” parody of Showgirls. Early’s performance is a kind of post-ironic magic trick, one that can only be compared to Divine’s domestic melodrama performances in Hairspray & Polyester. You immediately forget that Maddie is a woman played by a male comedian; you just accept her as a person worthy of the world’s love, from the hairs on her stringy blonde wig to the everyday commonality of her sagging breasts (arguably, the MVP movie prop of the year) to the sensible shoes on her feet. Maddie’s in-movie audience loves her too, as she finds fast fame online making relatable cooking videos that outpace the view counts of her more pristinely put-together coworkers (most notably, Claudia O’Doherty as her test kitchen employer’s queen bitch). The fame gets to her, though, exacerbating her private struggles with bulimia so violently that she’s voluntarily institutionalized. From there, the movie takes a detour into Girl, Interrupted homage, introducing the audience to a clique of other women in crisis to fall in love with (including Vanessa Bayer as her ditzy roommate and Kate Berlant as her predatory lesbian sidekick). Everyone involved is technically putting in ironic, going-through-the-motions comedic performances, but the effect of the scene-to-scene drama is still deeply, painfully heartfelt. It’s a lot like watching an actual vintage made-for-TV melodrama on Lifetime, in that it can make you laugh and cry, often simultaneously.

Some of the disparity between Maddie’s Secret & Gail Daughtry‘s respective relationships with visual, effortful beauty is that the imagistic standards of all media have declined over time. Gail Daughtry may borrow its story structure from The Wizard of Oz, but its visual cues mock the pedestrian, smartphone-quality digital footage of modern filmmaking — intentionally deglamming & demystifying the Hollywood dream factory. Meanwhile, Maddie’s Secret is set in the world of digital content creation, but it pulls its visual cues from an era when even made-for-TV movies were expected to be relatively beautiful. The standards of basic craft were just higher in past decades, so that certain lighting & framing choices in a TV movie about bulimia could be mistaken for a Fassbinderian homage to Douglas Sirk. As such, I should probably cut Wain’s film some slack for being so aggressively ugly & mundane, since its lifeless visual aesthetic is itself a critical commentary on modern comedic media production. It’s just difficult to do so while there’s another comedy in theaters that proves ironic humor does not necessarily require a lack of effort, emotion, or purpose. Maddie’s Secret looks great, lands laughs, and earns tears while maintaining the same dedication to feature-length ironic parody. It can be done, and it is worth the effort.

-Brandon Ledet

Conan the Sequelian

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

It would be ridiculous to claim that the sword & sandal genre is having “a moment” in Hollywood right now, given that two isolated examples do not equal a trend, and the two examples in question—Christopher Nolan’s epic Odyssey adaptation and Mattel’s failed He-Man reboot—are more of a “hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby” situation than they are brothers in arms. Regardless, spending so much time watching ripped men wield swords against wizards & monsters in theaters this year (over 300 minutes of combined runtime) had me thinking back to the ultimate icon of muscly fantasy cinema: Conan the Barbarian. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s casting as the sword & sandal comic book warrior Conan made for some gorgeous meathead action-fantasy imagery, and much of the original 1982 Conan the Barbarian film plays like high art as a result, despite its thoughtless participation in the lowliest of genre tropes. That mix of high & low makes Conan one of the quintessential examples of its genre, but what’s to be made of its two lesser-seen, lesser-loved sequels? Are they also high-art pop cinema like Nolan’s The Odyssey or are they ironic toss-offs with open disdain for their childish audience like the new Masters of the Universe? The answer, of course, is yes; they’re both.

As hyper-violent & hyper-horny as the original Conan film can be, the audience who most gleefully latched onto it were children in the same age range as its source-material comic book’s demographic. At least, that appears to have been the thinking behind its 1984 sequel Conan the Destroyer, which softens Conan’s sex & violence just barely enough to step down from an “R” rating to “PG” (in the precarious months just before the invention of “PG-13”). Conan is in live-action He-Man mode here, thrusting his giant sword against goofball monsters (like the pro-wrestler goblin played by a rubber-masked André the Giant), and picking up a goofball sidekick to crack wise along the way (Tracey Walter, whose performance splits the vast difference between Rob Schneider & Peter Lorre). Still, blood spews by the gallon from open wounds, and decapitated heads still fly across the screen, so Conan the Destroyer ends up playing like a remarkably gory kiddie feature. The highly sexualized casting of Wilt Chamberlain & Grace Jones as Conan’s companions on a mission to transport a young princess with her virginity intact feels like a winking joke that the movie’s school-age audience is too young to get. What they would get, however, is some insanely age-inappropriate violence, like in the climactic battle where Conan slowly rips the bleeding horn out of a yonic demon’s skull while it screams in agony.

While Conan the Destroyer exposes its school-age audience to adult-level bloodshed, the 1985 Conan spinoff Red Sonja exposes them to adult-level sexuality. Red Sonja technically isn’t a Conan the Barbarian film at all, since it’s adapted from a different property penned by Conan creator Robert E. Howard, and Schwarzenegger is officially credited as playing “Lord Kalidor.” Whatever, he’s Conan; the audience cannot be fooled. The only non-Conan thing about him is that he plays second-fiddle to the titular female lead, the red-haired warrior Sonja. Major kudos to series producer Dino De Laurentiis for managing to find an actress who could match Schwarzenegger’s cartoonishly wooden line deliveries in Brigitte Nielsen; Sonja & Conan make a lovely bonehead couple, especially in scenes where they use violent swordplay as an act of foreplay — teasing their mutual intent to “conquer” each other. The only problem is that there’s now a literal child onscreen jealously watching these foreplay bouts, acting as the audience surrogate and the would-be couple’s pint-sized sidekick. Also, the story starts with Sonja’s violent rape (which scares her off of men until she meets the godlike Conan), then goes on to include footage of a topless belly dancer and jokes about the child companion’s enormous penis. On paper, I’m not sure “misandrist rape-revenge saga” screams “kid-friendly adventure comedy,” but that’s exactly how it plays out, which is probably  the reason why Red Sonja is considered the nadir of the series.

Despite their dire reputations, I was mostly amused by Red Sonja and Conan the Destroyer. The only major disappointment, really, was that for kiddie version of Conan the Barbarian, they don’t make full use of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s talent for delivering groaner one-liners. There are a couple of jokes in Red Sonja that heroically go for the cheese, such as Arnold’s quip, “Tomorrow, I start my diet,” while crawling through a collapsed cave or “How’s the food around here?” when crashing a party in an enemy’s palace. For the most part, though, the wisecracking is left to the other sidekicks in his traveling parties, and no one comes near matching his comedic chops. There’s no reason why Conan the Destroyer had to have Conan punching out poor, innocent horses for the audience’s entertainment, but would it have killed them to have Arnold punctuate the gag with a deadpan line reading of “Quite horsin’ around”? Much like in the original Conan the Barbarian, he’s mostly used in the sequels as a visual symbol rather than a genuine acting talent, when he’d soon become one of the funniest comedic actors of his era, ironically or not. Neither of the Conan sequels go fully goofy with it, which leaves them trapped between violent action spectacle and kitschy kiddie fluff — a no man’s land for finding & pleasing an audience.

-Brandon Ledet